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Can Seniors or Caregivers Find Your Senior Living Website?

How to increase web traffic and visits to your website

You can have the greatest website in the senior living industry – but if potential caregivers or residents can’t find you, then you need to make some changes. To make your site easier for seniors to find, try these tips below.

Revisit your keyword strategy

If you haven’t optimized your site yet, you need to. If it’s already optimized but you aren’t ranking or seeing additional traffic to your site, you need to revisit your keyword strategy. Make sure that you are choosing keywords that make sense for your site. If you are going after terms that are too broad, you may have trouble ranking and getting potential caregivers or residents to click thru to your site. Try focusing on more niche terms with smaller search volume. Target the highest search volume terms on your home page and focused on longer tail keywords on deeper pages. Remember that you may want to use local modifiers as well if your senior living community is only located in specific geographic regions.

Consider a paid search campaign

A paid search campaigncan target additional keywords that you aren’t ranking for, and can also help support keywords you are ranking for. Because you set your own budget in paid search campaigns, you can start small and measure your success before investing more money. Be sure to use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant searches. It’s also important to test different ad variations to find the most effective message. And don’t forget to use a custom landing page (or appropriate landing page) on your site to make sure users are directed to a page that makes the most sense and not just your homepage.

Do a technical audit

Search engine optimization (SEO) hinges on more than just keywords and on-site tactics. You also need good technical practices in place so that search engine spiders can find your site. Setting up a Google Webmaster Tools account will alert you to any errors on your site, as well as how many pages are being crawled. GWMT will also inform you of HTML errors such as duplicate content and duplicate meta data. You should also make sure that your robots.txt file is set up properly. Finally, pulling a Screaming Frog report can help you identify areas of your site that need technical improvements.

Create a social strategy

Social media is not just for young kids. In fact, Mashable says senior citizens are the fastest growing population of Facebook users with 43 percent of Americans over the age 65 using at least one social network. If you haven’t already, set up a Facebook account for your senior living community. It’s a good idea to use Google+ as well. While you likely won’t get as much interaction on Google+ (you’ll probably see more likes, shares and comments on Facebook), having Google+ is a good idea to help with your search engine optimization efforts. Remember to use keywords when including links back to your site while still sounding natural. In addition, include social share plug ins on your website to encourage potential caregivers or residents to share content via their favorite social media channel.